House of Sol
by anikam
Summary: "Forgetting is mundane, but recollection is divine. Choose divinity, habiibii; gods don't bleed." But as Katara Jaan stained her fingers and inhaled sweet oblivion, forgetting seemed divine and recollection for the weak. Afterall, Zuko did not need her memories. So what use have she for them?


**WARNING: **Rated mature for dark themes, strong language, graphic violence, drug abuse, and sexual content. This includes smut and non-con. Basically, this is going to be a really dark story, so read at your own discretion.

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**Chapter 1 – Arrival**

_97 AG, Lakhnau_

Two hulking, vermillion sentinels stand as the true arbiters of the gatekeeper's powers. Bended from blood sandstone towering one hundred feet above the Si Wong Desert by only the most precise and inspiring hands, the Great Gate looms over its blossoming orchids, the budding plants, and screeching insects that attempt to encroach on its domain – strong stone walls branching out from each pillar to encase the district in a cocoon. The width of space that separates the vermilion pillars offers an almost endearing, airy comfort, but the pillars themselves are so authoritarian in their constitution that even the men, or the insects, consider the Great Gate the elementally weathered god of the Red Desert. If the Great Gate is the god of the Red Desert, then, merely befitting her grandiose columns, arabesque inlays, and inner ring perch, the House of Sol is his consort – or rather, he is hers. The House of Sol surveys her district, musing from her sandy perch the merits of each flower – rose, lily, cherry blossom – and each insect, no matter how filthy or parasitic, and, seemingly, without prejudice – for what is a god if she is not impartial? Sometimes, however, she finds herself tolerating her consort's presence, dreaming in vivid red hues what a sight it would be to see that obstruction's decline into tiny, crisp vermillion pebbles crowding a gatekeeper's feet.

Of course, love without disdain can hardly be called love. Katara – a silver-tongued woman of many titles and a cavern of secrets – accepts this condition, fostering her musings as she reclines on the windowsill in her chambers. The house won't be receiving clients today, so she allows a bare leg beyond the sill, caressing the outer craftsmanship of her heliocentric apartment with a toe, while inking artistic expression onto a sheet of parchment. Her wrist guides the brush, mystical and antiquated lines of lyrical poetry inspired by the harmonics of her premier accompanist, Tansen. However, the writing was an entirely different story. Penning her artistry, Katara finds herself in a delightfully cynical mood, relishing the delicious narcissism gained from cynicism. From atop her windowsill perch, she sees men snaking in and out of brothels in the middle and lower ring – of course, the lower ring leaves little to the imagination: a man gropes the thigh of a prostitute pressed up against a wall, a woman inches open her cleavage to entice occupied passerby. These quotidian dalliances of sexual intrigue in the outer rings inspire Katara as she writes, stylizing men as bees who suckle honey from flowers and women as archways with undiscriminating taste. Tansen's laughter would exceed his pride.

"Excuse me," A soft whisper of a voice beckons from the doorway, "Darya _Jaan_, the Begum requires your presence in the gardens." The handmaiden gingerly pushes at the airy fabric hanging from her mistress' doorframe, slipping into her quarters with a discretion peculiar to mice.

"Why are you so keen on that name? _Darya Jaan,_" Katara sings her own name with mocking intonation, raising a hand to her breast and thrusting her chin forward for theatrics. "To hear that name inside these walls is to recall my own immortality, and who wants to be reminded?" she laughs, "Don't be so hesitant to call me by my name, Song. That's what these walls are for." Katara swings her legs from beyond the sill, throwing her weight onto her feet and setting her penned musings aside.

"I'm sorry, you're right, Katara. All of this is just so… new." Katara glances at her handmaiden from the corner of her heavy lashed, downcast eyes, recognizing the nostalgia etched into the girl's words and mistaking it for her own. Lakhnau had not birthed Song, like her mistress, onto her trembling cobblestones soaked through with blood, semen and afterbirth, guaranteeing her offspring an existence plagued by destitution and fragile hope. Song's life had its inception in the rice stalks of her western farming village, where her father bucked and spilled his seed into a woman he'd come to call lover, wife, and mother, until the day a Fire Nation soldier broke his jaw and took him aboard a ship bound for the colonies. No, Song was not born to Lakhnau, rather, she was cousin to the cities' offspring, cooing and stumbling in different households of paralleled grief until being ushered into Lakhnau's bosom. She was, essentially, an adoptee wary of her foster mother's teat.

"Lakhnau may not be the most inviting city of the Four Nations, but our house will always regard you well," Katara says, draping a saffron sari about her frame, the unblemished white hem of the garment garnished with fine gold tracery. "Soon," she says, "You'll find yourself stretched out on a daybed gazing down into the Lion's Court, or skipping rocks in the pond near the myrtle bushes, and you'll stop and ask yourself, what poisonous shrub did I eat from when I was little? What was the color that stained my hands and my fat cheeks? Did I survive? I can't remember. That was another person's life, and the details remain obscured in your rememory like a book you once skimmed." Katara pantomimes flipping through pages with her nimble fingers, sauntering up to her handmaiden until all that separates them is a short breath. "A wise accompanist once said to me: forgetting is mundane, but recollection is divine. Choose divinity, _habiibii_ gods don't bleed."

Katara envelops Song's small boyish frame, holding onto her with an intensity and a warmth she can only discern as maternal. The color peaks in the maiden's cheeks as her large, toffee-colored eyes swell with tears, and the gravity of her mistress dawns on her. Song had seen Katara outside the vermillion desert twenty days ago, looming over a manager's shoulder as he processed Song's residential permit and called her Darya _Jaan _in between laughter. Katara had referred to him as Abbas, and they spoke in amicable taunts and ridicules, a banter that Abbas had clearly relished – the tell-tale signs of a raised, crinkled brow and a curled lip on his pointed features had amused Song. Upon procuring Song's identification from her purveyor – a bushy-eyed man with a penchant for narcissism and irregular bathing – Abbas stamped the permit with the sigil of the Flower District, ironically referred to by prostitutes and philosophers as the Red Desert. The sigil was a red cherry blossom with each blossom represented as a three-pronged flame, the sigil of the Red Empire.

"How much do you want for the girl, _sayyd_?" Katara had piped up, plucking Song's permit from Abbas's fingers. The purveyor, confused by Katara's apparent disregard for social order, regarded Katara briefly before inquiring from Abbas where he could find a _jaan_ of the House of Sol. I must sell this plain sow, he said with a rough air and a quiver of chin whiskers. Katara grinned, her laughter echoing over the vermillion desert as though it were a cavern, reminiscent of the jingle of the ghungroos shackled to her brown feet. She said, "You are looking for a _jaan_, hm? _Salām_, I'm Darya _Jaan_. How much do you want for this plain sow?" _Sow_ sprouted from her lips with the unhurried nature of molasses, and the purveyor looked at her with unmasked reproach.

He sputtered, "Two-hundred silver pieces, _jaan_! I will take no less." The gray tufts of chin hair Katara was certain he'd call a beard trembled.

Katara clucked her tongue, "No, no, no! I pay no more than one-hundred silver pieces for a sow, _sayyd_." She arose from behind Abbas and strewn ninety silver pieces across the table, lifting a perfect brow in challenge. Song heard the enchantress' jest, the jingle of the coins – or was it her ghungroos? – and raised her gaze to the brush of her bangs. Katara's elegant hand was perched on her hip, the tip of her thumb brushing against the skin of her bare midriff. Her body leaned with the regality of queens, the eroticy of whores in the vermillion desert and of women drawing water from wells. Hers was the everywoman of the three remaining nations, and the enchantress' sooty fingertips sang of their pain.

"You said one-hundred silver pieces, _jaan_…" His shrouded eyes counted the coins, followed by two unruly gray bushels conjoining at the knot in his forehead, "This is only ninety – you must have miscounted." It was more of an assertion than an acknowledgment of a mistake.

"I didn't miscount, _sayyd_. I thought better of it," Katara said.

Song hugged remnants of a past life to her chest and eyed the enchantress steadily. By Lakhnau standards, Song was little more than a country bumpkin – straw hat and ruddy complexion in tow – and the plainness of her prior life was unacquainted with this brand of rapport. She had been used to paddy fields and pungent salves; to a plain man whose words held no edge and whose hands were worn to the crease with iron and life, and a woman whose skin hung from her bones with maternity. As Song stood listening to the mocking intonations of the _jaan_ and the light jingle of bartering, plainness appeared a novelty. Only the naked meanness of her purveyor snarled with familiarity. "Here! Take your sow!" he barked as he wrenched Song forward by her wrist before clawing the coin into a cupped hand at the edge of the table. He mumbled something incoherent about Lakhnau and thieves, and then trudged off in a huff of quivering gray whiskers. "May her milk be sour, _jaan_!" he shouted.

"Lovely parting gift," Katara said as she waved to the purveyor's back. "Good tidings, _sayyd_! Don't take any wooden nickels!" Her and Abbas laughed as they watched the purveyor's amorphous frame waddle away from the Red Desert, swaddled in a blue fabric that would prove too loud for any thief to ignore. Song hadn't noticed, rather, her interest laid with the blue-eyed enchantress who paid for her as one might a cow, yet treated her more human than anyone since that red morning in Taebaek. "Now," Song's savior proclaimed, "You'll be following me to the House of Sol where you'll develop a distaste for men and an addiction for opium. Actually, the opium will come later, but the point remains. Come, come. Abbas, _ma'a as-salaama_." She turned to leave.

Song fumbled with her belongings and her feet in the sandy Lakhnau street as she pursued her mistress, turning the idea of this "house" over and over in her mind until her tongue started to bleed. "May I ask a question, Darya Jaan?" Katara looked over her shoulder briefly and smiled, nodding. "The House of Sol, what is it?" Song asked.

"A finishing school for whores, really. We recite poetry, sing, dance, fuck, and cultivate a nefarious and cunning intellect as to mesmerize and ensnare our patrons. But don't worry. We fuck far less than we sing, and we sing _often_." She turned to beckon Song to walk beside her, placing a slender hand at the small of Song's back. "What was your last profession – oh, and what is your name? I apologize for being crass. I don't really have a head for pleasantries in the daylight hours."

Song's taut limbs relaxed at Katara's slight touch and soothing, albeit odd, voice. The enchantress spoke the mother tongue of the eastern Earth Kingdom with ease, but Song gleaned the subdued existence of another tongue with a musical cadence and a contemplative, soft tone. However, at that moment, Song's concern for her future outweighed her proclivity for linguistics. "Song. My name is Song, _jaan_. In Taebaek, I worked with my parents in the rice fields and at the local apothecary. I made medicinal salves – mostly to treat burns," Song replied, asking her following question in the same breath, "Will I be a whore then?"

Katara's melodic laughter echoed throughout the Red Desert, the ghungroos shackled around her ankles chiming in harmony as she drew her new charge into a warm embrace. "I spoke loosely, _habiibii_. We _jaan_ do not sell sex, rather art. We are purveyors – curators, if you will – of art and, conversely, we are art itself. We entertain the nobility with our charade and, according to our discretion and at our leisure, we _might_ entertain their affections. So no, Song. You will not be a whore. If you are lucky, you will be a slave until your debt is paid. If you are not, you will be a _tawaif _of the House of Sol." Song raised her round eyes to see her mistress, anticipating a joking grin or even a plaintive smile, but Katara's lips were set in a hard line and her eyebrows were knotted in what Song mistook for concentration. Her bluest eyes looked beyond the desert's dusty patrons and congested streets, and she gleaned Song's future, thick with soot and songs, and a deep, dark tingle rippled through her body like sound.

In the Red Desert whores kicked up their feet and the sand sung, quick fucks passed between thighs and coins between hands, and whores threw water across their doorsteps. Life wore on. A blanket of darkness fixed with stars soon engulfed the city, and the red lanterns strung along the pleasure rings were it in evening ceremony as men filtered in through the vermillion columns of the Great Gate. Amongst the sea of laymen, officials, and blue-blooded nobles eager to trek across the Red Desert's sands and sample its favors, a black-haired man leaned against the vermillion post of the Gate. The left side of his face was married in angry, pink and red scar tissue, and his pale skin was rough and slightly tanned from his maritime travels. He was foreign and, upon appraisal by several nosy patrons, royal – albeit the brand of royal that diligent servants of the Red Empire are loathe to kowtow. But, in two days time, their loathing would retreat in quiet submission as they prostrated themselves at their prince's feet – only just informed of Emperor Ozai's public declaration of his son's reentrance into the line of succession.

"Hey, capt'n, do you see her?" A man with shaggy dark brown hair and a leaf stem hanging out the side of his mouth saddled up to the prince. He looked like a vagrant, but the teasing curl of his lips and the inquisitive arch of his brow bespoke a conqueror. It was apparent from the prince's long sigh that this man was an irritant more often than not, and, after a venomous glance at his shaggy-haired friend, he shook his head and resumed scanning the crowd. "Been a long time, brother. Maybe she don't wanna see you, haha!" His laughter rang out deep and robust, with the rising and falling cadence of a man who doesn't take life seriously because he's seen enough of it.

But the prince didn't have the spirit for his second mate's existential shits and giggles today. His father had let him back into the fold, reinstating him as heir apparent to the entirety of the Red Empire – a privilege he had worked toward since his banishment twelve years ago. But here, leaning against the Great Gate scrapping his nails along his forearm like a nervous eight-year-old boy, his pursuits felt empty. "Fuck off, Jet. She's probably already in the upper ring at this hour. We'll come back tomorrow." With one final, desperate look at the crowd beyond the Gate, the prince turned his back to the Red Desert and nudged his head forward, urging Jet to follow.

Jet sighed, then decided to laugh at the futility of the entire situation. "I'm tellin' ya' right now, Zuko. If I come back to this damn gate tomorrow I'm gettin' laid."

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**Disclaimer: **I don't own any of the characters from _Avatar: The Last Airbender, _but I think that goes without saying. Why am I writing this?

**A/N: **As you can probably tell, I've changed several things in the Avatar World - including location names and the ethnic makeup. I was actually inspired by pugletto's worldbending art series, so if you haven't seen them, I encourage you to check them out. Anyway, I hope you liked it! If you do, please review or favorite! The more feedback I get, the quicker I'll be to update. I've got a lot planned for this one!

_P.S._ For clarity, Lakhnau (located near the edge of the southwestern earth kingdom) is modeled after 17th/18th century Lucknow (hence the name). Basically, everything south of Ba Sing Se is Africa and Western Asia; Fire Nation East Asia; the North and South Pole by the Inupiat (I'm speaking in broad terms here, not literal, oh these are all monolithic, terms). There's more, but I'm cardinally challenged, so the upper half of the Earth Kingdom is culturally distinctive too. I'll most likely use other languages depending on where we're at in the Avatar World- as more of a way for me to establish, pseudo-geographically, where we are/character's prejudices/etc than anything. I don't want to romanticize any of these cultures, but I also I don't want to devalue/offend the culture itself. If you see anything that seems questionable, don't be afraid to point it out. I'll then try to explain myself, and if my explanation isn't sufficient, I'll try to rework things. And Katara is kind of a fuck the patriarchy/heteronormativity/colonialism kind of gal, so if anything I'm _trying_ to work against misrepresentation. Also, I'll be introducing some real historical characters (like Tansen, the Hindustani composer) at my liberty.


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